Claims to be Christian - Yeah, right.

Wilson went to stay with Misty. Well, that would be that. Shirley, remarried, had recently left her husband and was homeless as well. Not only were she and Joy living there, but Cheri, her little girls and Junior too. Wilson would be under the same roof with his ex-wife and all their kids and grandkids. A remarkable situation; they were one big happy family again. He wouldn’t need my babies and me. Also, with the amount of drinking and smoking going on there, it wouldn’t be long before he got started and that would be the end of his talk about sobriety and Christianity.

Wilson not only stayed sober but he kept coming around. I started letting him watch our kids while I was at work. For two weeks he courted me. One night he picked me up from work and took me to our old restaurant - just like we used to. When he dropped me off and drove away, I felt as though I’d been on my very first date ever with him.

One day I called home from work. "Wilson, I forgot my medication this morning. I just don’t feel like I can cope. Could you bring me my medicine?”
“Sure, I’ll be right over.”
But the medication didn’t help. It was my life I hated. How could a drug change that?

After just two months, I left ‘bitter’ BetterLife and went back to the family-run nursing home where I had felt more comfortable.

“Shirley is going back to live with her husband in Detroit and Joy wants to move in with me,” Wilson said one day.
I sat down. How could Joy “move in” with Wilson? He didn’t have a place. I knew I was asking for trouble again, but I really did love Joy. “Well, I guess you both could come here.”
Joy and Wilson moved back in with me on March 16. I explained to Steph that I had to do it for Joy’s sake, but she didn’t believe it. We argued and Steph moved out. Troy also went back to Salmon Lake and stayed there.

I enrolled both Joy and Andrew in swimming lessons at the YMCA. While they were in class and Haley was in the nursery, I worked out in the weight room. I was there partly to get back into shape after having a baby, partly to build myself up in case of another attack by Shirley.

Joy reported that the family from the Rez rolls joints on their coffee table. Four- year-old Andrew joined in, “I stole some cigarettes from 7-11 for them. They wanted me to smoke one.”
“And Mom,” he confided, “Rose is Louis’ girlfriend. They were in the garage and she told him to put his hand in her pants.”
I felt sick. Rose and Louis were both nine-years-old.
Standing on our sidewalk with Andrew, I pointed from one house to another.
“I don’t want you to play over there or that house either. They do bad things over there. You are not to go inside the house across from them, or play with the kids over at the red house. And stay out of that green house, too.”
“But Mom,” Andrew objected, “then there’s nobody left to play with!”

Elmer and Marcia came to visit relatives in Salmon Lake, then came down to the city to spend a couple nights with us. Having them physically in front of me was reassurance that they really existed. Seeing them was like nourishment.
“Why don’t you move on out to west?” Elmer cajoled.
“I’m buying this place. Where would we live out there?”
“There’s plenty of places.”
“Well, if we did go Wilson would have to find us a nice house first.”
“Well, don’t be so high on the horse. Sometimes you have to accept something not so good for awhile if you want to make a better life. You might have to accept living in a trailer or something.”
Later, I spoke to Marcia. ‘What happens if I quit my job, drop this house, go all the way out there and then Wilson starts drinking again?”
“He really is a Christian now. I know; I saw him crying on his knees on my living room floor. I was there.”

I still didn’t think I loved Wilson and didn’t trust that he was really going to stay sober. And I most definitely didn’t believe he was really a Christian. But I knew I wasn’t happy being a single mom trying to buy a house I didn’t like in a neighborhood I hated. I also knew I’d have to be evening charge nurse for awhile. When Andrew started school in the fall, I’d never see him.

I also knew I was an angry, bitter woman and if I kept going that way - my heart filled to the brim with hate - I’d end up like some of the bitter, old women I had worked with in the nursing homes. I decided moving couldn’t be worse than living here.

We sat around the dinner table with Mickey, Joy and my kids. We made a commitment to each other that we were going to stick together and move as a family. Grandma and Grandpa were having their 50th wedding anniversary and later that summer was my class reunion, so we decided to wait and move in late August, before school started. I’d have to prepare the house for sale and hire a realtor.

Some time later, Savannah killed her mother’s boyfriend

Some time later, Savannah killed her mother’s boyfriend. He had been verbally abusing Annie, and Savannah got angry, went into the kitchen, returned with a knife, and stuck it in his back.

I didn’t hold Savannah to blame, though. I couldn’t. So many people had abused her. I blamed all the adults who could have – should have – helped her, including Roland and the social workers. I was disgusted with them all. Why didn’t anyone help her?

After the murder and Savannah’s arrest, I called her defense attorneys and told them how she had been living. I wanted her lawyer to know what she had been through – the alcoholism in the family and the abuse, neglect, and gang rape she’d endured. I wanted him to be sympathetic. But I also called the prosecution. I wanted someone to finally do something.
I don’t think anything I said had any affect on anything, but her first baby was taken away from her, and Savannah went to a group home. And that was great.
_______________________

Wanda was admitted to BetterLife Treatment Center. Wanting to encourage her, I went to visit. Once there, I felt I’d better explain my absence from the extended family. It wasn't just because Roland and I were separated or because I didn't get along with his oldest daughters.

“Wanda, I haven’t come around you guys for awhile because I care about you all and just can’t keep watching all the bad things going on. I just can’t keep watching everyone get hurt and die.”

Wanda didn’t take offense. Instead, she felt touched by the idea someone cared. ‘No one’s ever said anything like that to me before,” she answered quietly.
________________________

My Sister Steph moved in with me in January. When she came, I was excited. I had visions that we would shop together, do each other’s hair and in general, be sisters together in a way we never had before. But neither of our schedules ended up allowing it. I was working the 3-11 shift and at times even back to back or doubles, and she was working two jobs. We rarely saw each other.

Troy and Mickey were my babysitters, not because they were good but because they were convenient. Some mornings I’d find Haley soaked in her crib because they hadn’t changed her before putting her to bed. And there were times girls stayed over while both Steph and I were gone. Steph was especially angry when one of her heirloom coffee tables was broken.
______________________

Troy came home one day and told me something Misty had said about me. That was it. I’d had enough.
“I’m going down to kick her a—right now.”
Matthew stopped me. “She’s pregnant. You better not go over there.”
“I don’t care. I’m sick of her!”
I was afraid if I stopped now, I’d never do it. I jumped in my car and drove over to Cheri’s place. Standing in the snow outside, I called Misty down from the upstairs duplex.
She hurried down the stairs and opened the screen door. “What?”
“I’m so sick of you and your mouth! If you don’t cut it out, I’ll kick the s--- out of you!”
“Wait a minute.” She turned and ran back up the stairs.

Living in Indian Country: Wild Ricing

When we returned from the reservation in August, I resigned from BetterLife. I wanted to be free to go with Wilson at the end of the month for ricing season. Without a job, I spent my days doing nothing but be with him. One afternoon we hopped on a bus to go see Bruce. We hadn't seen him at all that summer. Arriving at his apartment house, we saw a panel of buzzers for the different apartments, the names of the occupants above each buzzer. We looked up Bruce's apartment number, but his name wasn't on it. No one answered the buzzer. Wilson and I went home confused. That evening Wilson called Bruce's son.

"Sorry," his son said, "Dad was killed last month. He was all tanked up on his mo-ped, and took a turn into a car. He was killed instantly"
The next day, Wilson and I drove out to the veteran cemetery near the airport and found his grave, a simple white cross in a long row of white crosses. Maybe if we’d stayed in touch, he wouldn’t have started drinking again. We felt guilty for not having visited him earlier. As we stood at his grave, we knew he would always remain a very special and important person in our hearts.

The wild ricing season was the end of August and early September. Elders would go to the edge of the lake and inspect the crop, deciding the proper time to begin the harvest. The harvest had rules. No one can begin ricing until the season officially opens and canoes have to be within certain specifications. The point is to try to preserve the fields for another year.

Wilson loved to pole for his dad. Standing at the end of the canoe with a 15 to 20 foot hand-hewn pole, he pushed the canoe through the rice stalks. Walter, sitting in the middle of the canoe, was the 'knocker'. In each hand he held hand-hewn sticks about 32 inches long. The knocker would take one stick and reach out to the rushes, pulling them toward him over the canoe while with the other hand knocking the rice off of the rush and into the boat. Both knocking and poling are hard-learned skills; people who are good at it are in demand.
Not wanting to stay on the tract by myself, I went along every day and waited on the bank of the lake. I took a good book and sometimes took walks through the woods. Walter called me "Wilson's shadow."

One morning just after arriving at the lake, I saw Wilson throw a Coke can into the brush. I went to get it. Looking over the tall weeds, I saw all kinds of pop and beer cans strewn about.

"Wilson! How come everyone is throwing their trash here! You're Indians, you’re supposed to respect the environment!"
"Don't worry about it," he said, obviously irritated with me. "The Boy Scouts will pick it up."

They usually riced until dark or until their boat was so full that they could take no more in. When they got back to the house I rubbed Walter's back and listened to him talk about when he was a young man playing the amateur baseball circuit or when he was in the service and stationed in Germany. ("Sprechen due deutch?" he'd ask, "nein", I'd answer.)

Walter offered to teach me to dance. Everyone thought he was joking. But up he stood and over he came. I wasn't a very good student, but I had a good time.

Step by step, Wilson and his dad showed me the process of harvesting and preparing wild rice in the traditional way. Few did it that way anymore. If they kept their rice, most people brought it to a place for bulk processing. But many didn’t even hang on to it. A lot of the younger people would sell their rice directly off the lake to brokers waiting on the shore and at certain stores. Some ricers would get their bags wet, causing it to weigh more and get a better price. Others would put rocks in the middle of their bags. Some saved their money until the end of the season, but many took their cash immediately and spent the night drinking. But Walter and Wilson saved their rice. They preferred to keep it, process it the old way, and use it through the following year.

When Walter felt he had enough rice to get started, he went go to the backyard and placed a load of cedar wood in a small pit. After lighting the fire, he put a metal sheet over it. The sheet was bent up around the sides in order to keep the rice from falling off as he took a pole and pushed the rice back and forth on the sheet. This prevented the rice from burning while it was being parched.

Next came the 'jigging'. The parched rice was placed in a concrete pot that was put into a hole in the ground. Wanda then stepped into the hole onto the grain. Her hands on the ground to steady herself, she quickly moved her feet up and down to grind the hulls off of the rice. This could take about two hours. When Wanda got tired, someone else took over. I was glad they never asked me. It didn't look easy.

When the rice looked ready, Walter took it out of the hole to fan it. He put the rice a few scoops at a time into a wide, fairly flat, birchbark bowl, then, while standing with his back to the wind, bounced the bowl to shake the hulls out of the rice. Finally, the rice was brought to the kitchen table, where we all went through it, cleaning out any left over hulls. This was the final product, ready to store for meals all winter.

"Would you like to try some Indian popcorn?" Walter asked me.
Taking some of the rice, he popped it on the stove just like corn. Imagine making popcorn with rice!

Parching the old way was also the best way to finish the rice. When preparing it for a meal, rice parched the old way didn't have to be boiled. All I had to do was pour the hot water from the boiled potatoes (a staple at each meal) over the rice, cover it, and let it set for about 15 minutes and it was ready for the table.
In Wilson's mind, real wild rice is the only rice worth eating. But for me, it was bland and tasteless. I had to doctor it up with butter and salt at first in order to get used to it. I learned a lot about cooking that month, though. It had never occurred to me that baked beans or macaroni and cheese could be made from scratch. Annie also tried to show me how to cut up a fish. This was not something I wanted to learn, so I weaseled out of it as quick as possible.

In my simpleness, I had always thought I knew how to cook. Well, I knew how to make hot-dogs anyway. It was a blessing for them all that I didn't cook much while I was there.


This whole time and season was something that, in the years later, remained very dear to Wilson's heart.

March, 1980. Meeting Wilson

I hurried down the long hallway of the treatment center toward a patient's room. As I quickly walked, two men ambled up the hall toward me. One was a staff member, the other a new patient on crutches. The new patient was a Native American with classic features. He eyed me closely as he walked by, making me feel extremely uncomfortable. I didn't like being stared at.

That Indian better stay away from me, I thought as he passed.

BetterLife Treatment Center, on the seventh floor of Sunshine Park Nursing Home, was an alcohol detox and treatment center specializing in geriatric nursing care. Because of BetterLife's ability to provide specialized nursing along with alcoholism treatment, the program occasionally accepted younger people with physical needs other alcohol centers couldn't cope with.

I learned that the Indian man had been hit by a car after leaving Arthur's Bar six weeks earlier. Late to meet a girlfriend at another bar, he was struck by a fast moving Buick while crossing the street and sustained a fractured leg. He had spent the last month and a half in traction at the county medical center. He was at BetterLife because of the medications and physical therapy he still needed for his recovery.

BetterLife was focused around the 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous program. As a Nursing Treatment Assistant, I worked with patients on a daily basis with both their physical and alcohol treatment. Doing the first step with people was always one of my favorite duties. Reviewing their past in an attempt to bring out the problems related to alcohol and their powerlessness over it, I heard their stories and got a chance to know them personally.

Although most caregivers involved with emotionally vulnerable patients are able to remain objective and detached, it's not uncommon for a nurse to occasionally develop a close relationship with a patient. Unfortunately, I had a tendency to get attached to one or two patients at a time. Doing step work with patients only amplified my tendency in that direction.
I became attached to a seventy-year-old woman when she broke down and cried over the murder of her three-year-old daughter at the hands of her husband fifty years earlier.
I fell in love with an eighty-year-old Florida transplant when she swore at me for trying to explain that those were elm trees outside her window, not palm trees.

But having grown up without a good relationship with my father, my biggest danger was that I had an overwhelming need to be protected and wanted. In February of 1980, Bruce Gates was the resident I was most fond of. A war veteran, he was fifty-ish with white hair and a fatherly appearance. I wasn't assigned to Bruce's first step, but I'd met him in group session and found him to be smart, warm-hearted and funny. Although I didn't go out of my way to find time to speak to him, I enjoyed his teasing when we were around each other. We developed a warm friendship.

At the same time Bruce was also developing a friendship with the new patient, Wilson, the Indian man. Whenever I ran into Bruce, Wilson was with him. Together they would tease me good-naturedly.

Wilson also began hanging around the nurse's desk more.
He was kind of a nice person after all, I decided.


I wasn't assigned to help Wilson with his first step either, but he wasn't comfortable with the person who was and asked me to help instead. There was nothing in his first step that struck me emotionally. In fact, my initial impression was that Wilson was skimming the surface, not totally forthright in his story. But through the open door of this first step work, Wilson began to tell me details of his life.

He was 100 percent Chippewa from the Fish Lake Reservation. Wilson's generation was the last of primarily full bloods on that Reservation and until he was five-years-old, he spoke only Ojibwe. As a baby he lived near the lake with his family in a small house without plumbing. When his mother remarried after his father died, he stayed with his grandpa, Way-zhow-ush-quah-je-wabe, in the woods near Leech Lake. The rest of his five or so siblings stayed with his mother and stepfather, Walter, who were drinking heavily. I say five children or so because the number varied. Both adults entered the marriage with five children each, but some of the older ones were already married and others moved in and out. Five more children came after Wilson.

The drinking wasn't the reason Wilson went to stay with his grandfather. Grandpa drank too, although not as often as his daughter. Grandpa needed Wilson to help him around and be a companion. But the relationship was reciprocal; Wilson cherished the help and companionship his grandpa gave him in return. Spending much of their time alone together, they grew very close.

Of Wilson’s early childhood he spoke fondly, "We used to camp by the lake in large groups," he said, describing traditional events such as powwows and ricing. "Gathering wild rice every year was our time to be together and see friends and family. We looked forward to it, just like Christmas to you guys. Other times in the woods was when we gathered maple or went trapping and fishing."

Wilson stayed with his grandfather until he was five and it was time to begin school. When the time came to leave, Wilson hated to go. He adored his grandfather. But his parents still spent time with his grandfather at the gatherings in the woods. There, Wilson continued to learn from both his parents and Grandpa the traditional way of life and food gathering. However, Wilson's mother and stepfather were also Christians now. As Christians, they were determined to raise their children to be sober and love the Lord.

"They had all of us kids sit at the table after dinner for Bible study," Wilson remembered.

Nevertheless, after his Grandpa’s death six years later, Wilson began drinking. His parents, who had no problem with spanking him when he was younger, now backed away.

"You make your choices. Just don't come crying to us when you get in trouble," his mother said.

Wilson took to running away from home and getting into trouble with the law. Finally, he was sent to a foster home and then to a boy’s reformatory.After graduation from the reformatory he attended Haskell Institute, an Indian college in Kansas. There he trained as an architect. He enjoyed the work; creative design appealed to him. He worked as an architect for a couple of years before, according to Wilson, he'd dated the Sheriff's daughter once too often.

Wrestling with his jailers as he was being thrown into a cell, he grabbed the doorjamb with his left hand to keep from being pushed in and they slammed the heavy door right on it.
The next morning, the doctor worked to save most of his hand. Although the doctor was successful and he lost only half his thumb, he was unable to use that hand for a long time and so was unable to continue as an architect.

Wilson was in and out of jobs for the next few years. His life alternated between trying to pull himself together in alcohol treatment and being drunk. His life fluctuated from honest workman to social outcast and back again. BetterLife wasn't his first time in treatment; it was his fourth, and he now had a wife and four kids. He hadn't lived with his wife for the last six months, though, and he didn't see much chance of returning to his marriage. According to Wilson, she was always critical of him and mean with the kids.
"Anyway, my wife won't like me sober," he said.

Most days, I began my shift in the afternoon and inevitably found Wilson and Bruce leaning against the wall in the hallway. Wilson, swinging his cane in his hand, was always nicely groomed. His clothes, including his jeans, were always pressed, and the cuffs of his sleeves carefully and perfectly rolled under twice. The two of them talked quietly to each other as they watched people pass. They always had a big smile and hello when I approached.

When I had the opportunity to take a group of residents for a walk, Wilson joined me. It was spring, and another aide and I guided the group along the parkway toward the University. The river sparkled below us. Wilson and I, while at the same time speaking and laughing with the group and enjoying the sunshine, walked together and talked.

In the late evening, Wilson and Bruce were the only ones still in the smoking room watching TV long after the older residents had retired. With the shift almost over and the work all done, I took the time to sit down and unwind.

I couldn't imagine myself relaxing at night with the Indian I was sure to steer clear of earlier. Funny, now I looked forward to it.